queen stuck in cage

I checked on my newly installed bees this morning. The queen was still in the cage!! There was no sign that the bees were eating the candy plug at all! I can't believe it. I was so pleased that I installed the package right this time and now the bees didn't do their part!

Unfortunately, it's been 4 days since I installed them. (I had a busy week.) I hope the queen is OK still. I let her out. She looked fine. Small. I think what happened is that the bees were all to busy eating all the honey and pollen I gave them and they weren't interested in the candy plug.

new package installed

To prepare my new hive, I set up a deep box with four new frames (the ones with wood edges) in the middle and six drawn frames (the ones with black plastic edges). The two adjacent to the new frames were extracted, the other four were full of honey. I'm glad to be able to feed the new bees honey. (It's from my hive that died in the middle of the winter.) I think they'll like this better than sugar water.



They were very nice bees. I dumped them all in the box. And I put the queen in correctly. I didn't break the metal hanger or remove the wrong plug like last year. I'll check in two days to make sure she got out.